GarminXT

July 3rd, 2009 nk Posted in GPS | No Comments »

In recent days I got the opportunity to test the latest edition of Garmin XT for Windows Mobile.

I installed the program on a HTC Smartphone with a 200Mhz ARM processor, 21Mb of free memory and Windows Mobile 6.1

The installation, using ActiveSync, was easy. The program installed quickly and painlessly.

I was surprised that GarminXT was incapable of finding the internal GPS chip. I had to enter the port and baud rate in a configuration file. After that it found the satellites fairly quickly. Another disappointment was performance: when simulating a drive along a route the program was painfully slow. The display was jerky with very slow screen redraws.

I will grant that the phone I was using is not the mightiest in processing power, but both iGO8 and Destinator work on it without any difficulties.

GarminXT seems to use similar routing algorithms to the other Garmin units. They are not bad and most of the time the routing is reasonable. The program desn’t have Text To Speech, so all the spoken directions are generic, like: “Turn left in 800 feet”. It is not bad, but Destinator 8 has an advantage there.

In terms of route planning the program is somewhat clunky. It’s difficult to check the differences between the fastest and the shortest routs.

There are few optimization options.

In summary: if you have a choice between the GarminXT, Destinator 8 or iGO8 chose one of the latter two. GarminXT is definitely outclassed by either program.